The Offing is an online literary magazine publishing creative writing in all genres and art in all media.
The Offing publishes work that challenges, experiments, provokes — work that pushes literary and artistic forms and conventions.
The Offing is a place for new and emerging writers to test their voices, and for established writers to test their limits.

The Offing actively seeks out and supports work by and about those often marginalized in literary spaces, including Black and Indigenous people, and people of color; trans people, cis women, agender, gender non-conforming, genderqueer, two-spirit, and non-binary people; intersex people; LGBQA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, asexual/aromantic) people; people with disabilities; and especially people living at the intersections of these identities.

The Offing believes that writers and artists deserve to be compensated for their work, and we pay our contributors. We are working diligently, with your help, to raise the funds to increase our current contributor honoraria amounts, and to increase the frequency and amount offered to our editorial staff.
The Offing initially began under founding Editor-in-Chief Darcy Cosper as a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), with LARB providing a home on its server, and offering administrative support and umbrella 501(c)3 status, in exchange for a percentage of our donations. For all other costs, such as honoraria for contributors, funds were raised by The Offing’s all-volunteer editorial staff.
The Offing reserves the right to remove previously published content for any reason, including but not limited to situations where we believe that doing so will protect the integrity of the publication and its mission.

Thanks so much for your interest, and we look forward to reading your work. Please be familiar with the magazine and our mission before you submit.

For 2026, there will be no submission fees thanks to our generous donors.

In your cover letter, we encourage you to include information that you would like us to know, such as whether, if we choose to publish it, this submission will be your first publication.

Please DO NOT email any submissions. We will not accept any submissions via email, only those sent through this portal.

Just a few additional things:

• Upon publication, contributors will be paid a $25–$100 fee, depending on department and number/length of works published.
• All pieces should be original, and previously unpublished in any format in English.
• We acquire first serial rights worldwide in English and non-exclusive anthology rights. 
• Simultaneous submissions are accepted; please be sure to withdraw your piece promptly if it’s accepted elsewhere.
• Please don't send more than one submission per department; wait until your work is accepted or declined before submitting again.
• Our Fiction department is happy to consider excerpts from novels and short story collections, especially from small presses. If you have something you would like considered, email excerpts as a Word .doc to mary@theoffingmag.com. Please note that we currently don't have a budget to pay for excerpts, but we do want to help bring readers to books that might otherwise get overlooked.
• We'll do our utmost to respond within six months, but due to the volume of submissions we receive, and the careful & collaborative nature of our review process, that may not always be possible. Thank you for your patience.
• If you have any questions regarding your submission or our submissions process, please contact us at info@theoffingmag.com. However, please do NOT email any submissions, as they will not be considered via email, only through the links below.
• Any work created using AI must do so as part of an intentional engagement with or critique of AI usage and must be accompanied by or marked with explicit denotation of where and how AI was used.